Coda
by ucsbdad
Summary: Just a very short fictional comment on a Caskett adventure.


Coda

By

UCSBdad

Disclaimer: I don't own this, yadda, yadda, yadda. Rating: K Time: After season eight.

Captain Kate Beckett and her husband, Rick Castle, stood outside of an office on the twenty seventh floor of an abandoned office building. Both had their pistols in their hands.

"Ready, Babe?" Kate whispered. "He's just on the other side of the door."

"I've been waiting years for this. Let's do it."

Kate silently picked the lock and then pushed open the door. Both charged through with their guns ready. "NYPD! You're under arrest!" She yelled.

A shadowy figure at the end of the office laughed. "Arrested? For what?"

"The kidnapping of my husband, Rick Castle."

The figure shook his head and laughed again. "Kidnapping? You got nothing on me, copper. Nothing at all."

"I have enough for a search warrant and for an arrest warrant for you. You can tell your story to the judge."

"There'll be no judge. All you have are a bunch of dumb theories thought up by your husband and his bizarre imagination. You've got nothing real on me."

"This is not one of my husband's dumb theories since it doesn't involve zombies or space aliens."

"I have other theories, you know, Beckett." Castle grumped.

"Name one."

"A Mafia hit on a spy or a spy hit on a Mafioso. Those are classic Castle theories."

"Okay. I apologize, Babe." She turned back to face the perp. "But this is my theory, and it leads straight to you. You might as well have autographed each part of Rick's kidnapping. Everything pointed to you once we eliminated the rogue CIA angle."

"So, you say." The shadowy figure said, but his voice wasn't as confident now.

"To begin with, you set fire to Rick's car once your people had stopped him. People see a car stopped by the side of the road, they think the driver had car trouble and is going for help. Or maybe he's behind a tree, peeing. Maybe someone calls 911 and maybe, if the local cops have nothing better to do, they send someone out to take a look. But set fire to a car? Everyone calls it in and before you know it, there are cops and firemen all over the place. Your team could have had hours to make their getaway, not minutes."

The shadowy figure muttered to himself:

"The Mercedes burns at both ends,

"It makes a lovely sight,

"But, Oh my foes,

"And, oh, my friends,

"It will not last the night."

"Then you had Rick call Vinnie the Scar to destroy the Cadillac Escalade you grabbed him with. Really? Vinnie the Scar? He likes me, you know. He ratted out what happened as soon as he found out something was wrong."

"Oh, and why was Castle kidnapped before he could get married? Let me remind you. I was because he had to get to Thailand at ONCE because of a matter of national security. So, what do you do? Get Castle on a plane ASAP? Of course not. You have him drop the money for Vinnie in a dumpster that's covered by a freaking security camera. What do you bet that Vinnie knows every place between here and Chicago that _isn't _covered by a camera?"

"And why go to all that trouble, anyway? The Five Families have been dumping cars with the bodies of their competitors in their trunks at long term parking at Newark Airport since at least the Gallo-Profacci wars on the early sixties. Nobody notices the smell since it's Newark. There's a dozen places where you could have left the Escalade and it would have been stripped for spare parts before you got out of sight."

"Then you send Castle off to where? To Thailand on this extra-urgent matter of national security? No, you send him to freaking Montreal, Canada. What were you thinking? That maybe the CIA didn't have enough frequent flyer miles to fly directly to Thailand? And then you have him make some nice videos for his family and then you send him to a bank. Richard Castle, a moderately famous writer, gets to wander around in public after he's been reported as missing from his wedding and cops everywhere are looking for him and whoever torched his car."

"Um, Beckett, I think I'm more than moderately famous. I'm sort of…." Castle was stopped dead by Beckett's glare. "You're right. Moderately. No more than moderately."

Kate continued. "Did it ever occur to you to have Castle write a damned letter to each of us while he was on the plane to Thailand? Would that have been so hard?"

The shadowy figure mumbled to himself about the difficulty of understanding how Forever stamps worked.

"And then your plot to explain where Rick was the whole time. Living in a tent and eating Slim Jims and drinking Red Bull? Do you know anything about Castle? He lives in a freaking loft in Tribeca and has a house in the Hamptons larger than half the countries in the UN. He eats gourmet food and drinks twenty- year old Laphroaig Scotch."

Castle interrupted. "You know the fourteen-year old Laphroaig is tolerable. I actually drank some five- year old tequila, although I did have the lemons imported from this small town in Spain and the salt was…" Castle could see the glare coming. "But enough about me."

"Castle living in a tent? Are you kidding me? He has trouble managing in a five-star hotel. Why once in Paris, the hotel concierge was rude to him and I had to…"

"Beckett! You said you'd never mention that!" Castle said, scandalized.

"Sorry, Babe. But getting back to you. If you knew Castle at all you would have faked him living in the penthouse of an expensive Vegas casino and he would have been found surrounded by empty Scotch bottles and discarded women's lingerie."

Castle smiled at the memories that brought back, but wisely said nothing.

"And what about having faux Jenkins there in that trailer for us to find just once, and then it's the real Jenkins? Did you think no one else would be at all interested in where Castle supposed was all those months? CNN had Anderson Cooper do a live spot from there. Geraldo Rivera wanted to open the tent flap on live TV. All one hundred and fifty-eight chapters of the Rick Castle Signed My Boobs Club made a pilgrimage there. And they all flashed their boobs. In no time at all, the place was over run with teenaged boys calling for more. The local cops said it was worse than a Justin Bieber concert."

"All one hundred and…." Castle stopped. "Not that I care, of course." He finished lamely.

"And then when Castle found out about Montreal, who was there to meet him but the false Jenkins to tell him that Castle had asked to have his memory erased. If Castle wanted it done, why the hell would the CIA care if he now wanted his memory back? And did the phony Jenkins have nothing better to do than hang around an empty building on the chance that Castle would one day show up?"

"He did ask for time and a half and double time on weekends and holidays." The shadowy figure said.

"There is only one person who could possibly have planned out something this lame, stupid and incompetent." Kate yelled and shone her flashlight on the shadowy figure. "Wile E. Coyote! You're under arrest."

The furry felon laughed. "Nice try, Detective, but I'm sitting in an Acme Horizontal Ejection Seat ®. When I pull this handle, I'll be shot through that window, the parachute will deploy, and I'll float down to the ground and make my escape on an Acme Rocket Propelled Motorcycle ®." He slammed the ejection handle back, and the chair tipped over onto its back. Wile E. Coyote was slammed repeatedly into the ceiling until he finally came to rest at Kate's feet.

Castle moved to slap the cuffs on him.

"Stay back, Babe." Kate said.

Just then, an Acme Rocket Propelled Motorcycle ® rammed through the door, hitting Wile E. Coyote and plunging him twenty-seven stories to the street below. When Rick and Kate got to him, he was entangled in the motorcycle wreckage and was waving a well-used white flag. Kate slapped the cuffs on him.

"When we get home can we play Rock Star and Groupie again?" Rick asked.

"Sure, lover."

"This time can I be the rock star?"

"Rick, who looks better wearing nothing but gold glitter?"

The End

**Author's note: I hope you enjoyed this fictionalized editorializing on what was wrong with the kidnapping plot. I am still working on the three stories I mentioned last time, but this just popped into my head.**


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